


God Forgive Me for What I've Done In the Name of Love

by Donotquestionme



Series: No Separation AU [2]
Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate universe - Eddie and his other don't separate during Venom: The Hunger, Angst, Animal death (very brief), Bad Ending (for now), Body Horror, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Other, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22626313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donotquestionme/pseuds/Donotquestionme
Summary: An AU in which a tiny, one word deviation from the original script of Venom: The Hunger sets in motion a chain of events that drastically changes the fate of Eddie Brock and his symbiote other forever.  (A sort-of sequel to 'It's Soup!')
Relationships: Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Series: No Separation AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628989
Comments: 118
Kudos: 69
Collections: SYMBRUARY





	1. Not to Me. Not if It's You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of losing control and eating the brain of a biker gang leader, Venom must reconcile the two halves of their being, or be forced to be torn in two between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw for numerous references to vomit

I heave the contents of my stomach into a dumpster, trying desperately to purge my body of what it had just consumed. Viscera, not yet begun to have been digested, splatter in a horrific mess onto the foul smelling, rotting heap of rubbish inside. 

I cough and sputter, spitting out blood and acidic bile that burns at my throat and mouth. Before I can hope to catch my breath, the image of the events that had just come to pass flash through my mind’s eye and I’m retching again.

There’s nothing left, yet I am desperate to purge more from myself. As if the vile, odious deed staining my soul and hands could be as easily regurgitated as the the putrid evidence thereof that was now fated to be the burden of whatever sorry soul was tasked with the maintenance of the dumpster I’m doubled over. 

My body is screaming at me. My Other is screaming at me. Trying to cling to whatever minuscule bit of whatever it was that drew us to that loathsome atrocity we’d just committed. That sinful siren’s call that had beckoned us in, taken control of our mind, driven us to...to…

I retch again, stomach aching with the repeated force of the sudden expulsion of its contents, throat burning as acid never meant to travel upwards through it ate away at the delicate flesh. My stomach muscles clench painfully, long since having nothing left to eject and now only able to twist and heave in the attempt. 

How? How could I have...have…? How could I have committed such an abominable sin? How could I have wanted to? 

God help me, how could I have _ enjoyed _ it?

Finally, I draw back, slumping against the dumpster. The cool metal feels like a relief against our flesh. Normally my Other regulates our temperature, but now we’re burning, yet frigid, shivering, yet sweating.

The Other is writhing around and through me like a thousand, furious snakes. I can feel it combing through each organ, each cell, searching desperately, and futilely. 

I can feel its silent wail of agony echoing through me. 

It had had it! Just a bit, a drop, but it was something! Now there is nothing! And it hurts! To need so badly. To want so badly. It had not been enough! It was still not enough!

The thoughts are pressed so close to mine they feel almost like my own and Venom becomes an even more fractured entity as I recoil from them.

**“What?”** I whisper, unable to believe what I feel from my Other, yet also unable to doubt what I can feel so clearly.

It presses towards me that feeling of need, grasping against me like pleading hands. Begging, compelling.

**“What do you mean you want** **_more?!”_ ** I cry. 

It replays the memory in my mind, tainted with its shame, but overpowered by its need. It feeding me a lie, pushing me forward, encouraging me, falling into line with the twisted desires that gripped me, feeding them, fueling them, joining them.

**“You wanted…? You made me…? No...** **_no…”_ **

My mind can’t reconcile what I’m hearing with what I know. My Other would never force me to do something like...never, never  _ want  _ to...to…

_ Need _ , not want. The Other stresses the difference in my mind, not in words, but feeling. The feeling conjures up images of scurvy-ridden sailors, sinking their teeth into citrus, feeling the sustenance they’d needed so badly returning to their system. Then they are suddenly sinking instead into flesh, warm, wet, tingly, and the teeth are our own. The taste is  _ brains  _ and it’s on my tongue now,too, and it tastes like  _ need. _

**“Like...a vitamin deficiency? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”**

Yes! That’s it! Yes! And so deficient we are! In need of so much more!

**“No!”** I scream and as I do I feel Venom fracturing ever more.  **“No...I won’t...Don’t ask me to...It’s horrible!”**

Our body is twisting and shifting, fracturing like our shared psyche. Turning itself inside-out as it tries to reconcile the two warring halves. The need and the repulsion. The disgust and the desperation. The horror and the  _ hunger.  _

But this isn’t Venom! It can’t be! Venom is not what they think we are! 

**“We’re not a monster! WE’RE NOT!”** I scream, pleading. With myself or my Other I don’t know. I shudder at the fact I suddenly need to know, need to draw a line between us. It feels wrong.  **“WE CAN’T BE!”**

Venom is  _ not a monster _ , but Venom is crumbling before my eyes. I feel myself shattering into my component pieces, breaking into Eddie Brock, into the symbiote, and losing chunks of myself in the widening expanse of liminal space that is stretching between the two. 

The Other wants. I want. Venom wants. 

We want to be whole. We want to be one. 

But the Other needs. 

**“No! NO!”**

The Other pulls itself away from me, uncovering the bare human form beneath and forming an approximation of our face together, but sleeker, more angular. 

Its eyes bore into me.

“What?” I whisper.

It wants to stay. It wants me to know how badly it wants to stay. Perhaps it would hurt that much less for me to believe it was abandoning me without regret. Perhaps then the familiar balm of anger and betrayal could help to soothe the wounds of our separation, but it can not bear for me to feel it wants this. Wants anything but me. But it needs something else. Something that hurts me to provide. Something I do not want to do. Something it could never force me to do. Would never. Will never.

The pieces fall into place and fear grips me.

“You can’t!” I cry.

It’s so sorry.

“Wait...I didn’t mean to--”

A horrifyingly familiar pain wracks our body and we are screeching with it. Screaming and writhing on the cold, damp ground of the city alleyway.

It feels like being pulled apart at the seams. Like each and every one of our cells are each being torn in half, but the realization of what the pain means is so much more agonizing.

The Other is trying to leave me.

Our pain is shared, as it always is. I feel the way it’s already aching with the need for a host. The need to be complete tearing at it before it’s even separated itself. And it feels how that adds to my pain, and how I feel it feeling that in turn, pain layering and doubling back and forth between us.

_ Please, please, please.  _ I beg in my mind, without true words, as no words can fully encompass the depth of my feeling. I can form no coherent thought. Only the desperate pleading.

_ Please, no. PLEASE. _

So much worse, this is, than any other time we’ve been forced apart by flame or sound. Worse, even, than being pulled apart, one agonizing strand at a time, at the Life Foundation. 

Only one time truly compared, because only one time had one pulled itself away while the other tried with all its might to hold on.

Only when it had tried to leave me for the Spider, when the pain of one half of us trying to pull us apart while the other clung with all of its strength knocked us out cold with its intensity. 

And this, even, is worse than that. Because Venom is tearing themself apart while no part of us wants to leave, not truly. There is no hope in any part of us, no desire, only pain and remorse.

One by one, the last of the tendrils connecting us are pulling themselves from my flesh, like my very veins are being dragged out. I’d rather they were. I’d rather be eviscerated. Rather have my flesh torn apart the way it feels like my body and mind are being. Rather have every scrap of flesh flayed from my bones than have it go. Than lose the only thing that’s kept me living. That gave me hope and life. That found me in the dark, cold pit of my own misery and filled me with warmth and light.

I cannot hold on. I cannot help but try, even as the pain of it threatens to destroy me. So little is holding us together now, I can barely feel the brush of its thoughts against mine. 

I feel it, like a whisper against my brain.

_ I’m sorry. But you can’t give me what I need. _

Words seem to suddenly return to me and I scream, with every ounce of might, of passion in me.

_ “LOVE,DON’T LEAVE ME!” _

Shuddering, I curl into myself, tears streaming down my face. My breath hitches as I brace for the final snap of the last bit of my Other connected to me finally pulls loose and leaves me a shell. A being not meant to ever inhabit itself alone anymore. 

It doesn’t come.

For agonizing seconds that feel like an eternity, no new pain comes. I feel raw and exposed, like an open wound, but not undone, not unmade.

Suddenly, I feel the excruciating tension of the last extended tendril slacken. 

I huff out the smallest of breaths, not daring to believe, to hope. 

The tendril draws back, dipping deeper into my flesh. Another joins it. Just enough connection to feel the outline of a word.

Love.

Love?

It’s a statement and a question.

I dare to take a shuddering breath, afraid as though just those vibrations would shatter this calm, send the world plummeting back into despair. 

“Love.” The word is barely a whisper out of my mouth. 

I hadn’t even realized I’d said it. Said it for the first time. Could it have really been the first time? Had I really never put it into words? Into that one, singular, all encompassing word? Words had always felt so small, so inferior to the depth of our communication with each other. Yet, suddenly the difference between unspoken and spoken is incalculably vast. Given sound, it is given form. 

“Love,” I repeat. “Love. Love.  _ Love.”  _

A mantra,a confession, a promise, a plea, a prayer. Now that I’ve spoken it once it feels as though there are no other words left to me. Nothing else that can express any feeling. Nothing else that has any meaning.

More of my Other’s mass draws back towards me, into me, into  _ us,  _ and I feel like I am likewise being pulled back together. Like the sharp, shattered edges of me are being filled and sealed. A layer of me, stripped away, finding its place once more.

I let out a shuddering breath as more of my Other flows back under my skin, filling up the hollow, aching places in me. I still can’t stop the tears flowing down my cheeks. 

The Other hesitates, just connected enough again for our minds to meld and mix. For thoughts and feeling to flow freely and uninhibited. I can feel it sift through my mind, through my soul, for the truth in my words, my word. 

It again forms a face to gaze at me, but softer this time.

I raise my shaking hands to each side of its face and it melts, every so slightly, into my touch.

“Love,” I say again. “Love?”

A statement and a question.

There is a long moment where nothing is said. I feel the other draw back into itself. Back to the space in its mind it keeps always separate from me, in the way I can keep no part of myself separate from it. A hallowed place I’ve longed to be allowed. I feel it searching itself, for its own truth. And for the courage to, as well, put it into a word.

Love.

I swear my heart stops. 

Love. 

Again, with more insistence. More resolution.

“Love,” I echo back.

Love.

“Love” Love “Love” Love "Love".

Love love love  _ love. _

The word echoes back and forth between us, in words and thought, in feeling and in frantic, pleading whispers. 

_ Love. _

I press its forehead to mine and the word settles over us, into us.

I call my Other back to me, back home, and I feel the last of its resolution crumble. It sinks back under my skin with a wave of relief so strong it steals my breath for a moment, then emerges just enough to cover me again in a facsimile of clothing. The long coat feels especially soft against my skin, caressing it. 

Misery and guilt wash over my Other, still shivering slightly, even as it maintains a fabric facade. The situation has not changed. The need in it has not lessened. 

“It’s true,” I admit. “I feel it as well. But…”

I swallow, throat still raw and stinging from stomach acid, then continue.

“But now we at least have an idea of what it is we need.”

My Other shudders, its cloth disguise rippling like the surface of a pond, suddenly disturbed by a stone plunging into the calm waters. 

My own words ring in my ears.

**_‘No...I won’t...Don’t ask me to...!’_ **

I grit my teeth, then shake my head, wrapping my arms around my Other’s quivering mass.

“You’re not asking. You don’t have to. I...” I nearly choke on the words, but I have to say them. “I’m  _ offering.”  _

The writhing only gets more intense. 

**_‘Don’t ask me to...It’s horrible!’_ **

“Not if it’s for you--for  _ us!”  _ I correct quickly, before guilt can overcome it again. “Not if it’s for us. For Venom. Not more horrible than being...than…” the phantom pain of us pulling apart sends a shiver through us both.

“ _ Nothing  _ is more horrible than that.  _ Nothing.”  _

**_‘We’re not a monster...we can’t be…’_ **

“And we WON’T be!” the resolution in my voice gives the Other pause. 

“We  _ won’t be,”  _ I repeat, softer this time, running my hands up and down my Other’s form until its shivering begins to calm. “Not as long as we’re together. Not as long as it’s for us...for love. As long as it’s for love, for us to be together, that’s all that matters.”

I reaffirm it to my Other, to myself. All the matters is that we’re together.

May God forgive me for everything else. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An AU I've had in my head for some time in which the Other does not leave Eddie during the events of Venom:The Hunger. I wrote "It's Soup!" with it being a part of this AU in mind, but it also works as a stand alone canon oneshot. Once again, I'm not used to writing in first person or present tense so forgive any accidental tense or person shifts.
> 
> Chapter title is a reference to the quote "I'll care for you" "It's rotten work" "Not to me. Not if it's you."from the play "Orestes"


	2. Thou Wouldst Withhold Not Even Thy Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Venom's mental and physical state are deteriorating and Eddie and his Other spend a rare moment of rest together.

I wish I could say it took longer.

Longer for it to stop being a struggle.

Longer for the act to start feeling less sinful and more sublime.

Longer before the crunch of bone beneath our teeth brought with it nothing but relief and exhilaration.

Longer before human beings started looking less like people, and more like prey.

I wish I could say I fought it every step of the way. That I had had to beg my Other to take control for those crucial seconds. That I hid away within ourselves so as not to see it, to feel it, to taste it. 

I wish I could say that my descent into the depths of depravity and sin had been met with the resistance befitting a righteous man.

But lying has never been my strong suit.

We lie against the cold,damp stone wall of our subterranean domicile. The worn, moldy mattress beneath us our only shred of domestic comfort. The Other is wrapped tightly around me in the form of thick blankets, but I’m still shaking. 

I can’t remember the last time I slept. It’s been weeks, at least. The buzzing of the deficiency will not let me truly rest, even in the short moments of calm we are afforded before the hunger becomes too great again and we’re forced back onto the streets, a predator on the hunt for anything deserving of being prey.

It has become clear that whatever it is that we need, we are not getting enough. Even with the abhorrent lengths we’ve been going to, it’s clear we cannot make up for the extent of our deficiency, yet we are already too weak, too consumed by it, to attempt to find any other solution. Every time we must consume more and more, and every time it sustains us less and less. Ever more frequently, we are gripped by the hunger and compelled, more strongly than we could hope to resist, to appease it.

But for now, we have at least this moment. Of reprieve, at least, if not true rest. 

“Do...do you know the story of Abraham and Isaac?” I ask, voice trembling, knowing my Other, of course, does. It knows everything I know, holds in its fine ebony tendrils, every one of my memories. 

Yet, it prompts me to continue. Loves to hear my words, my thoughts, even when it could simply have the information whenever it wished. 

“God speaks to Abraham, tells him to sacrifice his only begotten son,” I continue. “To kill him. To slay his own flesh and blood. To break one of God’s commandments! To sin! And what sin could be greater than what he was called on to commit? To murder an innocent, his own child!”

Suddenly I’m racked with a fit of coughing, raising my voice as such irritating my lungs. My ribs ache with the motion.

Silently, I feel my Other weave its way through the porous tissue of my lungs and I can breathe easily again. The sharp pain dulls down to a low ache, no worse than any of the rest of my body. 

I rub my palm in slow circles over my chest, a wordless thank you. 

“And what does Abraham do when faced with this? When called on by his God to commit such a foul deed?” I clutch at the form of my Other, draped around and through me. “He agrees! He takes on that burden! For he knows God would not put any burden on him he could not endure! He held to his faith. He was resolute in his convictions, steadfast in his belief.”

Our body shifts from sweltering to freezing and I curl up as tightly as I can, trying to preserve whatever warmth I can.

The Other extends outwards from the layers it cradles me in, forming a head to press gently to my forehead. It rumbles softly, concerned by the warmth it feels there. 

Lifting shivering hands, I cup the sides of its head, reverently. 

My pure, cosmic entity. A manifestation of the heavens themselves. My holy, heavenly body. 

I close my eyes and press my forehead back against it, in return.

“Sometimes God calls upon us all,” I breathe. “To be resolute in our convictions. Devout and unshakable in resolve. To have the very core of our beliefs tested and to persevere. To do that which we find most repugnant, in service of...of…”

I open my eyes to gaze into the swirling, opalescent void of its.

“...the divine.” 

Divine, the Other echos, curling around me tightly. 

Without warning, a sudden, stabbing pang of hunger pierces our gut and I cry out. The Other shrieks and hisses, its form losing shape and splashing to the ground around us.

I writhe on the cold stone, clutching at my stomach and dry heaving from the pain. I feel my teeth stretching and sharpening. My tongue extends beyond the boundaries of my mouth, twisting and curling as if trying to grasp that which we crave from the empty air.

My hands ache as claws begin to extend from the beds of my nails until I’m leaving bloodied lines across my skin where my hands grasp at flesh in a futile attempt to sooth the agony gripping us. Our body tries desperately to become what we need it to be to give it what it needs, responding to mental command we cannot help but give it. I feel my flesh rippling and churning like that of my Other, teeth sprouting up all along the line of my jaw. 

We can wait no longer.

My Other draws itself back into me for just a moment, then seeps back out of my pores, flowing around and with my already shifting skin, melting and molding it into our shared form of Venom and we are suddenly filled with strength, the pain and weariness of our human body fading behind a warm, buzzing, red haze of bloodlust. 

It feels so much better to be together, so much stronger, but it also drains us more quickly. We find, the more we exert ourselves in our true form, the quicker the hunger takes hold again. We cannot afford to be Venom until we need to.

Until we are on the hunt. 

Now, blessedly together again, we feel raw, but real. Our body shivers now with frantic energy and anticipation. Our senses heightened, we can hear the reverberating footsteps of the humans treading the ground above us. We can hear their heartbeats, the racing flow of blood through veins. We can smell their _brains._

_Only the worst._ We remind ourselves. Our mantra. 

_Only the worst. The worst of the worst. The worst of the worst of the worst. The scum that not one singular being benefits from the existence of. That not one singular being would miss. That God Himself would look down on and see only filth. That deserve a fate worse than just death._

I wish I could say that those fitting such a description weren’t getting easier and easier to find.

I wish I could say that, more and more often, our teeth had not also found themselves sunk into the flesh of those just happening to be nearby to such vermin. 

That it wasn’t, sometimes, their innocent victims, even, that fell to our fangs.

We can’t dwell on that now, even if we wanted to. Our mind is already racing. Our teeth are gnashing, claws grasping, filled with that frenzy, begging to be used.

We remind ourselves, as well, of that which matters more than anything: that we are together. That we are one.

We are one.

We are whole.

  
We are _hungry._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddie and his Other aren't doing too well. Truth be told, there's not really a lot of phenylethylamine in human brains, but I imagine since it smells and tastes so strongly of all the other chemicals symbiotes love and feed on, like adrenaline, dopamine, etc,etc, it's immediately what they crave. But, since they're not getting very much from their 'meals', their health is still declining. 
> 
> Chapter title is an excerpt from a quote from the story of Abraham and Isaac. When Abraham asks God whether or not God knew he had been willing to sacrifice his son, God says "It was manifest to Me, and I foreknew it, that thou wouldst withhold not even thy soul from Me."


	3. Oh Please Don't Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie's body is failing and the Other's mind is going nearly as quickly.

I stumble down a dark alleyway, hand against the stone of the wall beside me for support.

It’s now been over a month since the fateful night our dark hunger was realized in full. Over four weeks since we made good on countless threats we never intended to have become earnest. 

Over seven since I’ve last slept. I’ve long since stopped trying, instead stalking the dark corners of the city at all hours of day and night. They’ve stopped meaning very much to us. 

I heard once that the human body is not supposed to be able to survive without sleep for more than three days. Even enhanced as we are by my Other, the base of our body is still human, and a human body has limits. Has needs just as the Other does. Now it seems as though I’ve failed in providing for the needs of either half of us. Failed as I fail in all things, in all ways. 

My anger has simmered and smoldered down to despair, which I find myself now unable to feel anything besides. 

My body is failing.

I am beset on all sides. The hunger which tears at my body with twisting, churning, stabbing pain, and the deficiency itself which saps my strength and decays my body. 

Yet it seems what does me in is likely to be simple exhaustion. Without sleep, my body is unable to naturally rejuvenate itself. To do any of the daily restorative processes that keep it functioning. 

My Other can replace those functions manually but it expends energy we don’t have to spare. It’s been replacing so many already. It weaves itself through my bones and organs, supporting and enforcing them. It always has, to some extent, but before it was enhancement. It could make me so much more than I could have dreamed before meeting it. Now, even with it supporting me from within like a steel armature within a sculpture, I can only just function. Under our false clothes, it forms itself like the second skin of Venom nearly all the time, but it doesn’t feel like the invincible hide of our shared form. 

Less like a suit of armor.

And more like an iron lung.

The Other can sense chemicals in our system, too, produced by our body or its, it doesn’t know, that are poisoning us as well. I remember warnings about things called ‘fatigue toxins’ back in my more intense body building days. That extended overexertion and the lack of fundamental nutrients can cause the body to produce and be unable to properly filter away various toxins created by the movement of muscles and the body trying to more or less synthesize the nutrients it needs. It’s why maintaining a proper diet and things like massage and other muscle care treatments are vital.

I guess I was never really careful about that then, either. Never cared about that kind of thing catching up to me before my Other came into my life. And afterwards, it was always there to soothe away anything that ailed me. I took that for granted. I took a lot for granted. 

My Other handles me with such delicate care. Treats me as though one wrong touch would shatter me like the most precious and fragile of stained glass. I can feel how hard it is trying not to draw more from me than I can give, but the fact of the matter is I simply don’t have enough to give it. 

My greatest and most shameful failure, in a life comprised of nothing but failure. Of nothing but letting down the ones I loved. 

Of nothing but not being enough. 

All I could ever really give it was a body in which it could live. For everything it blessed me with, I could only repay in such a mundane way that paled in comparison to the miraculous gifts it bestowed upon me. Now, I cannot even give it that. 

I'm less, even, than a warm body. A walking corpse alive only by way of, from birth, being too selfish and stubborn to die.

The Other rumbles, vibrating over my skin in light, comforting patterns as it senses my train of thought.

Warm. Strong. Selfless.

It forms a small head out of the collar of our long jacket that nuzzles itself against the underside of my chin, making soft, rumbling vibrations, like the purring of a cat.

The corner of my mouth twitches up in a half smile. 

“Forgive my dark thoughts, my love.” The term of endearment rolls off my tongue effortlessly. Having begun using them, now, I don’t know how I ever managed to go without them. Speech feels empty without the small, constant declarations of adoration. 

As much as my mind is constantly filled with regret. Regret for my inadequacies, for my very existence, I still can’t find it in me to regret my choice to stay with my Other. Even as I feel my body decaying out from under us, such pain pales in comparison to separation. Such despair pales in comparison to the idea of the hollow emptiness of being reduced to an individual.

No, my Other, and every choice I’ve had to make to stay together, I could never regret. 

But the Other is decaying, just as I am, though it seems in mind more rapidly than body. Its thoughts are simpler, more instinctive, and always dyed in a crimson hue of hunger, of bloodlust. As I find myself every day less able to feel anything but misery, it likewise seems to be less able to feel anything but hunger.But the dark, primal drive of a predator.

It worries me. I can feel that it worries my Other as well. I could never regret anything done in the name of remaining with my Other, but my Other is becoming someone I don’t recognize as much as I have likewise become, to myself, all but unrecognizable. A divide between us grows even as we devote more and more to the effort of drawing each other closer. Our minds are still beginning to feel as foreign to each other as they feel to ourselves. 

It worries me. And it’s not the only thing that does.

I am, every second of every day, aware of my own brain, sitting in my skull. 

Every second it seems as though I am more aware of it than the last. _We_ are more aware of it. Sparking with tingling chemical and electrical reactions. Thrumming with blood, with life, so tantalizing and taunting. _Tempting._

If it had what we needed, what we craved, we would surely not need to seek it from outside sources, we reason. But reason is quickly not becoming our strong suit.

Perhaps for one us more than the other.

It handles me ever more gently. Ever more afraid of what I may truly need protection from. 

A sound in the distance pricks at our ever attuned ears. Crashing metal, shouting.

Turning our face in the direction of the sound and on the wind we catch a scent.

_Brains._

My mouth fills with saliva and I can feel my teeth begin to sharpen as my heartbeat quickens.

I creep to the mouth of the alley and peer down the road to see two men shouting next to a stopped taxi cab. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” yells one of the men. His hair is longer and he wears a red baseball cap. “I outta break your fucking head!”

“My _head?”_ cries the other man, “You already _wrecked my bike_! That’s my job, man! How’m I supposed to work without--”

Baseball cap picks up the crumpled remains of the bicycle and tosses it aside, crashing loudly against the side of a building. He keeps screaming and the other man pulls out a knife, trying to keep baseball cap at a distance.

Nearly killing a cyclist then threatening them afterwards? No remorse. No compassion.

It’s enough.

I feel as though my body is almost all the way shifted before my Other even slides over my skin. Our tongue is lashing back and forth with impatience.

And he’s got a knife, too, all the better. We’re shivering with anticipation. Armed with intent to harm, that’s enough. Enough to justify it. 

But wait...which one had the knife? Intent to harm? Or a means of defense? We...we can’t remember. Our head is buzzing with a thousand thoughts of violence, of blood and bones and brains. Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. Warm and tingly, hits the _spot._ We can’t think of anything else.

Our head is so full and our stomach is so _empty._

Baseball cap is rummaging in the front seat of the taxi for something. Neither man sees us approach. 

Tear out their eyes...crunch through their skulls...dig out their brains...a moment, a second of relief...please that’s all we need...just a moment without this hunger...anything for that, _anything…_

We pounce, pinning baseball cap to the ground. Our saliva drips onto him in wet splatters. He screams and we can’t remember when that sound was anything but a dinner bell to us.

Our mouth opens wide as we prepare to bring his life to a swift and brutal end, but, in the moment before we strike, we catch a glimpse of our own reflection in his wide, frightened eyes.

We don’t look human. Not even humanoid. Our body, shifting and nearly shapeless, is lined with mouths, each lined, themselves,with rows of fangs. Gooey tendrils flail in all directions, separating and reforming with the main mass haphazardly, each with their own gnashing mouths, snapping in the air.

Eddie had never rejected the moniker of ‘monster’. Never feared it. He reveled in it, accepted it wholeheartedly.

But what we see reflected back at us is more than a monster.

It’s a _demon_.

Eddie’s mind recoils, flashing to visions of flaming pits and tortured, screaming souls. The Other is in turn struck by memories of fear and revulsion, screaming at it through a bond, then through thick cold, glass.

Venom is given pause. We aren’t supposed to be this! We’re weren’t supposed to be this!

This moment of pause is all the screaming man, pinned beneath our massive claws needs to pull himself together enough to make use of the tool we had not seen him retrieve from his cab.

A double barreled shotgun he now presses the barrel of directly against our chest.

_BAM!_

The force of the blast sends us staggering backwards, shrieking in a voice neither Eddie or the Other recognize as their own.

The Other’s flesh is usually all but impermeable, rendering us functionally bulletproof, but we are weak and the Other is spread thin, supporting our human half's body.

The symbiotic second skin is blasted away and the human flesh beneath it rendered to a bloody pulp, littered with bits of buckshot. 

The baseball capped man scrambles to his feet and both men try to run. The Other gives chase with the many gnashing-mouthed tendrils extending from us. They sink tiny, razor sharp teeth into the flesh of the retreating men, pulling off small, bloody chunks.

We--we--I…

I clutch at my chest with a clawed hand. It comes up coated in hot, red blood. At least one of my lungs has been hit,I can tell. Each breath is agonizing. My heart is stuttering.

I feel the Other’s frustration as it gives up its pursuit of our prey. It needs to return to me to heal me. It’s not too far gone to have lost that priority. Pulling all of its tendrils back to the main mass, It flows back over my chest, stitching my skin back together and forcing out the foreign bits of metal. With so little energy, it can spare none for easing my pain. It sends pulses of apology and concern. Still unable to do much more than gasp weakly, I can only gurgle in response. 

It coats my lungs and absorbs any liquid or foreign materials that got inside and I’m at last able to gasp out a full breath. I roll over and cough out any remaining blood

I slam our fist to the ground with a cry of rage and frustration. 

Both our prey, escaped! Escaped to tell every self proclaimed ‘hero’ in the city about our...endeavors. And worse, we’re robbed of a desperately needed meal. We had to expend so much energy to heal and we’ve nothing to show!

I double over as the hunger tears at my stomach, nearly as painful as the shotgun blast, bringing tears to our eyes.

Then, to my near disbelief, comes the sound of a car door opening. 

The cab had had a fare. A passenger.

I glance up to see a well dressed business man emerge from the taxi on the side opposite from us.

_A meal._

He’s shouts something but we don’t hear it. We climb over the cab on all fours, drool running down our jaw. 

Not as good as two, of course not, but it’s enough. If barely, it’s enough. It’s enough because it has to be enough. Because we _need it to be enough._

This time we do not hesitate. 

If he screams we don’t hear it, too busy frantically crushing through his skull. Our tongue snakes into the cracks that form, already grasping at that precious flesh, digging into it to savor that taste of rapture, of deliverance of--

Nothing.

Nothing?

_NOTHING!_

We snarl in disgust. 

Nothing! It tastes like _nothing!_ Like an egg without salt, it’s _missing it!_ Whatever it is we need, we can’t taste it in his brain at all!

Desperate, we swallow down ragged chunks of flesh and gray matter, but there’s nothing. No relief, no deliverance. _Nothing._

No no! There can’t be nothing! There can’t! There has to be something, _anything!_ God help us, please there must be something!

We lick the bowl of his skull clean, desperate to find any tiny drop of that invaluable substance, but still there’s nothing.

**_“NO! NO! NOOOO!”_ **we screech. 

I can feel the other squirming frantically, thrashing in and around me. 

It can’t wait. It needs it now! It needed this! It needs it! It can’t go without anymore! It hurts! It hurts!

My eyes widen and I go rigid as I feel the Other’s tendrils sinking deeper and deeper into my brain, tracing every fold, searching every vein and neuron. 

There must be something. There must be!

**“Lo--”**

I’m cut off as a sharp, excruciating pain explodes behind my left eye. Scream of agony stuck in my throat, I crumple to the ground, clutching at my eye.

I feel the tendrils digging into the flesh of my brain itself, searching, craving, needing. My vision whites out as pain drives through my head like white hot irons. Clawing at my temples, I writhe and convulse on the cold asphalt. 

It needs it. It needs it. It’s so hungry. Please, there must be something. It needs it so badly. It hurts. It hurts! IT HURTS! _IT HURTS!_

My muscles twitch and convulse without my command, seizing painfully, adding on to the torturous agony of my head, like a thousand drills boring into my brain. I try to force my body to obey enough to speak.

_IT HURTS IT HURTS IT HURTS!_ **_IT HURTS!_ **

**“L-L-ovve”** I choke. **“I-It** **_hh-hu-rts!”_ **

All at once my Other comes back to itself and, in horror, realizes what it had been doing. 

It flies from my body as if blasted by a sonic canon, as far away from me as it can get without separating, connected to me by just one, long strand. 

It shudders, terrified, disgusted, ashamed, appalled. It had hurt me. It might have...have…

I struggle to my hands and knees, my muscles sore from the convulsions and my head still aching. 

“My...my darling you didn’t mean…” I breathe, gasping for breath. “It wasn’t your...your…”

I cough weakly, hearing the wet gurgle of fluid in my lungs. I don’t have the energy even to feel shock when blood splatters from my mouth onto the pavement.

Blackness blossoms across my vision and my body gives out from under me. I have not even the strength to brace for impact against the ground. 

But the impact doesn’t come, instead I’m enveloped in warm, soft goo, cradling me with the care of someone handling a single snowflake, and lowering me gently to the ground. 

I feel despair rolling off my Other in waves. It’s so sorry. So deeply, desperately sorry. It lost itself. It couldn’t see me anymore. Didn’t know me. Didn’t know itself. Didn’t know anything. Nothing besides the pain of the hunger. It’s so sorry. 

Sinking back under my skin and into each of my organs, the pain dulls, but does not disappear. I have a feeling now that it won’t be fading completely anymore. I draw in a few shaky breaths, but my Other needs to help me even to inflate my lungs. 

My Other turns me upwards to lie on my back. A head is formed from its mass, gazing down on me, mouthless and with wide eyes that waver and pool at the bottoms. It takes a glob of it falling away and splashing against my face to realize it’s crying. 

“Hah…” I chuckle, softly. “I’ve rubbed off on you...that much...huh?”

I struggle to raise my arm and my Other wraps around it lightly to help me do so. 

I hold my hand against its face.

“I’m...I’m so sorry, my love,” I breathe, tears welling in my eyes as well. “I...I’m not going to make it.”

My Other prills shrily, pressing its forehead to mine. I can feel how hot my skin is against its flesh. Far hotter than it should be. I’m running a fever that should have killed me already.

I have to make it! Have to! Can’t leave it! Doesn’t want to be alone! Doesn’t want me to leave! Needs me!

“I don’t want to, love. You know I don’t. But...I...I’m just out of time...I’m dying.”

Our shared sorrow aches in my chest.

Images flash through my mind. A hospital. Separated. Taken in. Nursed to health by men and women in clean white coats. Getting better. It doesn’t care if it hurts while I’m gone. Doesn’t care what happens to it.

I shake my head, weakly. 

“I won’t survive the separation,” I say. “Even with both of us willing. You’re...you’re all that’s keeping me...keeping me alive. The strain...too much. Maybe even for both of us.”

All it’s fault. Should have left! Should have protected me! Selfish! A para--

“No!” A firm whisper is all the might I can muster. “Never that. Never...never think of yourself like that. No regrets now,love. I don’t regret it...not one single moment...not since the moment we met.” 

A pause for a moment.

“Could...could you take me there?” I ask. “One last time?”

I know my Other knows where I mean.

“I’d like...I think...to die...in the place...I was born.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's no moment I regret  
> Since the moment that we met.  
> If our time has gone too fast.  
> I've lived at last.  
> \-- If I Never Knew You (Disney's Pocahontas) 
> 
> Using this as a fill for Symbruary day 18 "Sharing a Brain" prompt. Both in the sense of 'in their head' and 'as a meal'.
> 
> Title is the first half of a quote I'll complete with the title of the next chapter.
> 
> Things Eddie is suffering from right now, according to The Hunger comic (including but not limited to):  
> Chemical poisoning  
> Extreme exhaustion  
> Severe brain inflammation  
> Extreme neurotransmitter deficiency  
> Extreme steroid hormone deficiency  
> "catastrophic" imbalance of brain chemicals
> 
> Our boy is doing poorly.


	4. We'll Eat You Up, We Love You So

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eddie and his Other return to end their journey in the place it began.

My Other encases me. It’s unused to controlling our body on its own like this, but I’m too weak to contribute and it too fearful and protective to let me. Its movements are not the smooth and effortless motions of Venom, but the journey is not far and it knows the way.

To the place where we both, in our own way, perished. The place where we died and were born and reborn. Unmade and remade.

The place we were married. Where we became one. Where Venom came into being.

The place we met. 

Our Lady of Saints.

The church is silent and still. Only dust moves through the beams of sunset streaming in through the stained glass, tarnished and dulled from neglect. 

We’re saddened by the fact that the church’s association with us has led it to be all but abandoned, but it serves us well enough today. We desire no audience right now.

The Other pauses for a moment by the alter. The spot that, a lifetime ago, stripped of all hope, of all will to go on, I begged to God to send me a sign. A reason to live...or permission to commit the cardinal sin of taking my own life.

He sent me the first.

I suppose, in that way, I have been on borrowed time since that moment. Each second I’ve had since then were bestowed on me as a gift from the Almighty. Given new life, reborn through His messenger. 

The Other doesn’t understand the idea of divinity very well. It’s not something its culture ever had. The idea of Gods and the worship of all powerful creators was never something it encountered before coming to Earth. It feels, however, that the spot is important. Symbolic to us, at least, even if it doesn’t grasp the religious connotations. 

It remembers me, head bowed and hands clasped, praying. It wonders if it should do the same. But such posturing would feel false, it thinks, and, in this moment, it wants no hollow imitation.

It climbs the tall church walls and up into the rafters, then higher still, to the bell tower. 

It was rejected here. It died here. 

It was accepted here. It was born here.

We were born here. Born again, merged deeper than ever. Vows renewed and purpose reaffirmed. During the symbiote invasion. When we offered ourselves to each other, down to each individual cell, to the very fabric of our souls. So that, even when torn apart, we’re never truly separate; always carrying a piece of our other in ourselves. In our minds, our bodies, and our spirits.

We turned this place from one of despair to one of love. We turned our sorrow into strength.

It’s fitting, I think, that our journey end in the place where it all began. 

Holding this solid form, especially while trying to put no strain on my body beneath it, is taxing on the Other. It releases it, forming back into an amorphous void of swirling blackness. It lowers me gently to the floor, propping me up with a cushion of its mass and wrapping me up like a cocoon of thick, jet black blankets.

I offer it a weak smile. It’s all I have to offer now.

My Other manifests its small, serpentine head and nestles against my chest, sorrow pouring off of it. We can both feel I don’t have very long. Neither of us do. My Other’s sanity is being held by a thread. Without my mind as an anchor, God knows what it will become. 

I stare at the cobwebbed ceiling of the bell tower, tears beginning to spill from my eyes and down my cheeks. 

“I’m so sorry, my love,” I choke. “I...I never wanted to leave you alone with this. To abandon you.”

My Other rumbles against my chest. 

It hopes...it hopes it will be too much for it, as well. It hopes our journey ends together.

“No!” I cry. 

I struggle to sit up, but I’m too weak. My Other wraps me tighter.

“No don’t say that, love, please!” I beg. “I already detest myself for abandoning you to the Hell I’m leaving you to. I could not bear the idea of you being dragged down with me.”

It doesn’t want to be alone! 

“There are other humans, other hosts! You--”

It doesn’t want them! It wants me! It doesn’t want to live without me!

My Other trembles against my skin.

It doesn’t want to live as what it feels it will be without me.

It’s scared. It’s so scared of what it will become. Something worse that everything it ran from. Worse than those who sentenced it to death for wanting to be something more than what it feels waiting for it. Just a creature, mad with hunger, feeling nothing but pain and rage. Worse than those we destroyed here, in this very tower. When we bonded so close and combined our rage and sorrow into a strength that they could not have hoped to withstand.

When we fused nearly entirely.

“Nearly…” I mutter, under my breath, the first fragments of an idea forming in my mind.

My Other raises its serpentine head to look me in the eye and prills inquisitively. 

“We’ve always been strongest together,” I say. “The less separation, the more pure and powerful our bond is.”

The Other senses that I’m leading to something but it can’t decipher it from my fevered mind. 

“What if...what if there was  _ no  _ separation?” My voice is breathy, something akin to hope beginning to form in my brain. “If two truly became only one!”

The Other’s form shudders, struck with the weight of my suggestion. Just our binding then had been so extreme, had seemed to shake the very fabric of space with its significance. More than that, it can barely conceive. Yet I feel it considering the logistics nonetheless. 

“Not a host and symbiote. One being that is neither. Just us.  _ Together.” _

Together...That’s all it wants. That’s all it’s ever wanted.

If it could consume my body, combine each cell with its own mass while preserving my mind...theoretically it should be possible. Without my body, my brain, it could not be tempted by them. Could not harm what was already a part of itself. Could not hurt me. Could save me.

Could kill me. Could fail!

“I trust you, my darling. I’ve nothing to lose.”

It would hurt.

“No worse than leaving you.”

We’d never be able to separate. Nothing left to separate. No human and symbiote. Something...different. Something it can’t predict. 

Once its starts, there will be no stopping. There would be no way to go back. 

With all the strength left in me, I lift my trembling arms to pull my Other’s face down to mine.

“Did I not already give myself to you? A thousand times over?” I ask, voice low and reverent. “Did I not bind my very soul to you here, in this very bell tower? What could this be, compared to that, besides a formality? I’m already yours, my love. And you, mine. Down to the very core of us. I do not hesitate. I give you myself in my entirety, as I always have. If you’ll have me.”

My Other rarely communicates to me in words. We speak in shared feelings, images, heartbeats. But, in this moment, I hear it. A voice, clear, crisp, and breathtaking.

_ ‘Always, Eddie.’ _

I feel my Other spreading out within me, coating every cell. A grin spreads across my face.

“Take me,” I breathe, lips pressed to the surface of its head. “Consume me. Unmake me. Unmake us and remake us.”

I wince as a burning sensation starts under my skin; the Other beginning to break down my cells.

“Bone of my bones,” I gasp, the burning getting more intense.

_ ‘Flesh of my flesh’  _ my Other continues, drawing the words effortlessly from my memory.

I press my forehead against my Other’s, teeth clenched, the pain growing still, like acid running through my veins, liquefying me from the inside out. My Other feels it just as keenly, connected to every one of my nerves, blending with each pain receptor.

“F-from this day f-forward,”

We cling to each other, fighting against the pain with the strength of our will, of our resolve.

_ ‘For better,’ _

Of our love.

“For w-worse,”

We can barely breathe. 

_ ‘For richer,’ _

My Other pushes up through my pores, coating my body.

“For poorer,”

It flows up my neck.

_ ‘In sickness,’ _

Coats my face.

“And health,”

I feel my Other painstakingly cradle my brain, memorizing every fold, filing away every memory, committing each sparking neuron of thought into the code of its own DNA.

We press our foreheads together and we feel something give. Our flesh melds together with no resistance, flowing together. In the last moment that there is a proper mouth between the two of us, we whisper, our voices combined:

**_“Till death do us part.”_ **

Then all we can do is scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is the second half of the quote started in the last chapter title. It's from "Where the Wild Things Are". The full quote being "Oh please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!"
> 
> A bit shorter chapter especially compared to the last, but things should really start heating up in the next one.


	5. Let No Man Put Asunder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A joining. A becoming.

It hurts.

It _hurts._

**_It hurts!_ **

It hurts worse than we could ever have expected. Worse than we’ve ever experienced. Worse than we can even understand. Worse than we were ever supposed to even be able to feel. More than either half of us was ever made to be able to endure.

Our human half would have passed out, gone into shock, or died long before he reached this level of pain, and our symbiote half wouldn’t have had the proper pain sensors to feel such acute agony alone. 

There’s no metaphor for it. No poetic comparison or colorful simile. Because the pain can only be properly described by its exact nature:

It’s dissolving yourself alive. Destroying and reabsorbing yourself at a cellular level.

It’s a chemical reaction the Other began in us, fated to run its course, unable to be stopped by either of us, for there’s no way we could have forced ourselves to endure it were we able to. Even without our consent, our body would have reflexively done anything it could to end the torture. 

We’re squirming and thrashing on the ground, our whole body coated in the black ooze of the Other as it consumes and assimilates more of our human half’s flesh. Our body forms and reforms, half of us trying to maintain a solid shape on instinct, the other instinctually trying to spread itself out into a nebulous shape to try to escape whatever was harming it. 

Bones twist and bend, flesh turns itself inside out. One moment, our face is pressed against the floor, the next, we are looking up at the ceiling.

Our leg spasms upwards, then splits at the knee, everything below it crashing back to the ground into a splash of black goo. Horror mixes with pain, watching ourselves come undone before our eyes.

We’re shrieking _shrieking._ Howling with all our might yet never running out of breath. Are we breathing? Where are our lungs? 

Our torso twists itself around and we writhe on our stomach, stretching our hand forward, grasping as if trying to reach something. 

We’re yelling something, it takes us a moment to realize what.

_“_ **_Edddiiiiieeee…! Edddiiieeeeee...!”_ **we wail, trying to cry out to the one we have always looked to in our pain, but only half of us has any name to give it. A name synonymous with safety, with protection. 

Both halves of us cry out to the other, and both of us are unable to respond, pressed too close together in our pain to find any line between us. We reach, grasping for one we cannot reach because they are us. In trying to reach for the other, we instead both grasp at nothing.

Before our eyes, our hand, as with our leg, crumples in on itself, breaking off each finger then entirely melting down to ooze. 

We try to push ourselves up on our elbow, but the strain likewise severs our arm at the shoulder, sending us slamming back down to the wooden floor of the bell tower.

Our limbs are gone. We can’t move. The last vestiges of our bones are rapidly disappearing into an ever-growing puddle of jet black flesh that is not wholly symbiote but certainly not human. Our shrieking stops as our face, dripping from the very last remaining bits of bone that once comprised our human half’s skull, sinks into the rest of our mass, choking and gagging on the ooze that floods our mouth for a moment before losing even the shape to do so, and disappears.

Unable to move, unable to see, to scream, we try only not to be consumed by panic and pain as the last of our cells break apart and merge together. 

It burns like fire. Like bubbling hot oil and acid. An eternity seems to pass like that, blind, deaf, and immobile. 

Yet, somehow, in that darkness, we can just feel it… The outline of our two minds, floating in that abyss. We cannot say which is which. We don't care. The feeling of every part of us is the same. The need to soothe and be soothed. To protect and be protected. To hold and heal and be healed and held. 

To not be alone. 

And we are not.

We are not alone. 

We never will be, never have to be. Never, never again.

It takes us a long moment to realize it when at last the process completes. We still feel as though we’re vibrating. We still feel the phantom burning across our...form? Mass? We’re not sure we could name it. We cannot even fully understand it.

We cannot see. We cannot move. The half of us that understands how to exist like this can’t comprehend the changes to its cellular structure to know how to get it to obey. The other half has barely any concept at all of what it is to move and control a body comprised of no rigid shapes, with no underlying structure. Both halves are in shock.

Our body can only react reflexively. Can only scramble to sift through two wildly different and opposing sets of instincts, trying to make sense of a form that is both and neither. 

Our mass begins to draw together, forming itself into an approximation of the shape of half of us expects it to be, and the other half is likewise comfortable enough being that it does not reject it.

We have no eyes, so we can perceive no light, yet in a way, vision still begins to return to us. A vague awareness of our surroundings somewhere between seeing, smelling,and feeling. An understanding of shape and the basics of material, but based heavily on how it relates to our position, our own shape. An understanding of shape in relation to our own, that would change as it did. 

Proprioception, but to a degree half of us can barely wrap its mind around. 

We draw into a more and more defined shape. Limbs congeal from formless ooze, tipped with digits. Human shaped only as deep as the surface, nothing but our uniform, unstructured mass beneath. 

Lips, nose, hair, teeth (yes, we still know those well). A long trench coat and pants, shoes. They don’t feel like cloth to us now. Don’t feel like they’re covering us. Nor do we feel that we are covering any part of it, ourselves. It’s all just...us.

We are not quite Eddie, nor are we quite the Other. We are not Venom as we’ve understood ourselves to be, either. They are in us. They are us. But...not as they were. Not as we were. Not as any being has been before us. Still two beings, but also one. 

Finally, eyes.

We open them, together, as something entirely new. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel bad about how short and forced sounding this chapter is but I've had it about this length trying to find some way to fill t more but just couldn't seem to expand it and, as with the last chapter which also had that problem, I just wanted to give it that hard ending line instead of continuing on into the next scene.
> 
> Chapter title is part of a religious quote The full quote is in regards to marriage: "So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man put asunder."


	6. Something Entirely New

We blink. It feels different. 

Then again, everything feels different. Pinning down exactly why is more difficult than we would have expected. The way that it’s different from being human is the inverse of the way it’s different from being a symbiote. Halfway between both and therefore not at all familiar to either.

It takes us a few more blinks to realize exactly what about it is so different, to both of us.

We don’t need to blink. Our eyes aren’t drying out without doing so. 

They’re not exactly eyes anymore. Our body seems to have chosen a form it felt comfortable looking like, but it’s like any other time the Other would shapeshift. It’s a facade. Like a sculpture or a painted doll, only the surface is carved into shape and colored to resemble that which it imitates. There’s no structure beneath. 

However, they are still orbs in sockets. They move as objects with definitive shape, not as nebulous mass that moves by reshaping.

Our sight is different, too. More like our sight as Venom than our eyes in our human form. It takes a moment to realize it’s because we are seeing out of the entirety of our eyeballs’ surface, not just the pupil, widening our field of vision and altering our depth of field. Our sense of color seems shifted as well, spread over a broader spectrum.

However, they’re still in sockets. Still half covered by lids and obscured by lashes. Still blending two limited cones of vision into a singular three dimensional sense of sight. 

Different to one for being the same to the other. The same to the first in how, to the other, it differs. And, in that way, equally alien to both. Inverse and reverse. 

Our next revelation comes when, out of instinct, we try to take a breath.

Our mind immediately sets off a panic response.

We’re choking! Suffocating! Our throat is clogged! We can’t breathe! _We can’t breathe!_

We spasm on the floor, clutching at or throat with our hands, the half of us driven to breathe driving a reflex to try to identify and dislodge whatever is blocking our windpipe.

Forcing ourselves to be still, we fight through the panic response. We clamp our hands over our mouth to stop ourselves from gasping for air. Logically, we’ve already realized that our inability to draw breath isn’t from a blockage in our windpipe at all.

It’s from the fact we don’t have one.

We’ve no lungs to draw in air, nor a throat for it to travel down. We’ve no internal structures at all as far as we can tell. We’re far more aware of the inner state of our mody than half of us is used to. Trying to be aware of every part of ourselves,feeling ourselves from the inside out, is somewhat overwhelming, only second nature to half of us.

After a few moments of our chest spasming, the lack of a burning need for oxygen seems to register to our body and we are released from the grips of panic. It’s still uncomfortable, though. 

Breathing for humans is something that rides the line between a purely automatic movement, like the heart beating, and a purely purposeful one, like moving one’s limbs. Automatic enough to generally have its presence go unnoticed, but purposeful enough to find discomfort in its absence.

Releasing our mouth, calm enough now to be aware of the sensation of movement, we find it strikingly different as well. It’s not the tensing of muscle under the skin to puppet solid inner framework, but moving the mass as a whole, controlled directly. 

It’s strange, not least of all in the fact of it being strange to begin with. The Other understood movement like this, or at least close enough. And, through that, our human half had been able to effortlessly control mass not so dissimilar to our own now. But then our symbiote half had been following the mental command of our human half, translating the idea of his will into its own movement. Now both the will and moment were foriegn enough that translation became a far cry from the instant and effortless synchronization we knew before.

If before it was like translating between two languages, this is like taking half of each word from both languages and mashing them together until they're all but incomprehensible to speakers of either. 

After a moment’s consideration, we rationalize the movement as being not too unlike that of a tongue. A singular, flexible mass controlled directly and able to move and contort in complicated and unrestricted ways. It’s something both halves of us can understand well enough to give the whole of us now an angle from which to grasp the concept. 

We sit up.

It’s strange, to half of us, at least, to require no momentum, no strain. Less like doing a sit up and more, again, like simply bending one's tongue. Willing a change in shape and position more so than directing body movement.

We open our jaw and reach inside with a hand to confirm what we can already feel is true: our mouth ends roughly at our soft palate, simply closing off. Again, we’re reminded of a doll, imitating a human form, but only so far as is necessary to maintain the illusion. 

Not necessarily a bad thing. The Other always absorbed things more so than “ate” them, in a human sense. Feasibly, that would work for us now as well. 

It could be inconvenient in terms of speaking, certainly. The Other had managed at times to make simple sounds. It was the complexity of language that stumped it more so than the logistics of creating sound. Meanwhile, Eddie had a firm grasp of language, even if the process of creating the syllables would be a mystery to him.

If our other can fill in the gaps in our knowledge then--

The thought hits us like a bolt of lightning.

OUR OTHER!

We scramble to stand up, our body too firm but also too soft.

Our Other! How could we forget? Why had it not been our first thought? Did they survive? Are they with us? Where are they? In trying to preserve both halves, did we reduce ourselves to only one?

Stumbling on legs we can’t fully control, we stagger forward to the large, bronze bell. We practically fall onto it, the clapper within swinging slightly. Our hands press against the metal, against the palms of our reflection that stares into us as hard as we stare into it.

We cry out for our Other.

**_“Eddie!”_ **cry, voice desperate.

We blink. Wait. What? 

But we’re...I’m…. _you’re_ …?

Oh.

A pulsing hissing noise bubbles up through our mouth, despite our lack of proper lungs or vocal chords, that grows louder and more defined until it becomes a vaguely human sounding chuckle.

In our choice of name and our reaction thereto, we’ve answered our own question. 

We beam at our reflection, who is smiling back just as brightly, and press our forehead to its.

“I’m here.” we tell it, and it tells us. “We are here. We are together.”

Pulling back, we observe our reflection more closely, taking in our new form. Our face is a palish pink, though perhaps paler and grayer than it was, still with the appearance of pores we can feel go nowhere. Blue eyes that still seem to have an aperture at their center, though we can feel it serves no actual function. Opening our mouth, we can see that it also appears normal, the sudden ending of it nearly entirely hidden by the natural downward curve of the palette. Our teeth might be slightly sharper, our tongue slightly longer, but we can't quite be sure. 

Our blonde hair still reaches to just about our shoulders but we find we can feel it. A cursory attempt informs us that we can, in fact, move it as we can any other part of our body. Our coarse stubble we can make stand on end of we wish.

All in all,we look very much like our human form had looked before.

Like we...like... _I_ had.

Like shifting focus from something far to something near, something likewise shifts and settles into place in us and I find myself looking at myself in the faded bell metal. Seeing the familiar face somehow made it easier for the both of us to reconcile our new existence and our individual place within our mind, more shared than ever. 

I can't take full control in the way I'm used to, nor can my Other settle comfortably into the back of my mind as it is used to, but we are able to find the separation between us again. We can feel each other’s presence.

We’re here. We’re together. 

We’re alive. 

Another set of pulsing hisses grows into chuckles, then into peals of joyous laughter. 

“We’re alive!” we cry, in unison. 

We wrap our arms around ourselves once, then again, and again. As many times we want. Until we look like we’ve been tied up with rubber tubes. We don’t care. 

“I’m alive! And you’re alive! And _we_ are alive! Together!” our voice is strange, caught between mine and the Other’s.

We spin around in our clumsy embrace, stumbling like a newborn faun on our strange new legs. Tears of joy stream down our cheeks. 

The Other helps me to unwind our arms from around us and I raise a hand to touch a single tear. It pulls away with my finger like a taffy. I marvel at it. At us. At this... _something_ that we are. This new someone and something we’ve become. 

It’s all just... _us._ Every part of us, down to our facsimile of tears, is just...our mass. Uniform and nebulous, as my Other’s was, but also more rigid. It feels...denser, more drawn to a singular shape. 

I stare at my hands and my Other guides my mind to control their mass directly. It’s strange to both of us. I’ve never been able to move like this directly and the Other is still trying to grasp the change to our cellular structure, but between the two of us we can still grasp it enough to stretch my fingers out into long tendrils that tie themselves in knots. 

I can feel my Other’s emotions so clearly. There’s no space between us, no wall behind which my Other hides all but the controlled responses it wishes me to feel. I feel its pride at my wonder. 

It practically preens as it shows me how the knots need not even unwind, simply passing through themselves until our fingers return to a human shape.

Though we have no heart, we feel as though it’s swelling with emotion.

It wants to show me. Wants to guide me through this new existence and be guided by me as well. It wants us to feel everything we can feel. Experience everything we can experience. 

The Other pulls a portion of our mass forward out of our chest and forms it into its familiar, jet black, serpentine head. 

It’s strange. We can both see from both sets of eyes, and it takes a moment to reconcile the strange double vision. 

I gasp at the swirling iridescence of my Other’s eyes. I had always found them beautiful, but now they shimmer with a thousand colors I could not have hoped to comprehend before, our new eyes giving me a range of color I’ve never imagined. 

We gaze into each other, together. 

The Other thought it had no time. It thought it would lose me. It was so sure it would feel my life end here, in the place it had died itself. It had felt and regretted every wasted moment it wouldn’t have. Everything it would never tell me. Everything it would never show me.

It has time now.

I smile.

We have time. All the time in the world. In the universe. Every moment of our lives, however long they last, will be spent together. A lifetime of experiences to feel. To show and be shown.

To live. 

_We’re alive._

The Other all but slams into my face, forming lips it crashes into mine. 

I wonder, briefly, if it’s emboldened only by our brush with permanent separation, or that some of my own boldness has rubbed off on it, before I’m too caught up in trying to match my Other’s passion in the kiss.

My hands grasp at the sides of its head, as if holding it to me. Our flesh melds and mixes back and forth, all one mass, shifting and stretching, feeling and being felt. We lose track of what’s supposed to be one or the other’s. We think at one point there may have been only one tongue between us, but we don’t care. It doesn’t matter. It’s all us, all our one singular and beautiful being. 

All that matters is feeling. Is touching. Is sensation split and shared between us. All that matters is that, after everything, we are alive.

We are alive. 

We are together.

And we will _never_ be apart again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Where did we go? What did we do?  
> I think we made something entirely new.  
> And it wasn't quite me. And it wasn't quite you.  
> I think it was someone entirely new."
> 
> I hard a hard time really describing this the way I felt really captured what I was trying to get across and I'm not really all that happy with the end result, but I do enjoy the light fluffy nature of this chapter compared to the last....all of the rest of the chapters. 
> 
> I'm sure things will stay good and that nothing bad will happen from here and the fact that not having an human host body didn't go great for the symbiote alone in the Hunger says nothing about how well it will go for these two :)))
> 
> Title is lyrics from the song "Something Entirely New" from Steven Universe. 
> 
> Eddie and his Other kiss like the couple from that movie theater scene is Osmosis Jones and you all have to live with that image.


	7. The End of Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now back to your regularly scheduled Suffering™

Even though we no longer need to breathe, when we finally part, we still feel breathless. 

My Other doesn’t need to pull back under my skin like before, instead simply undoing the pseudo head and reforming it into the rest of our body. We’re all the same thing, now. 

It’s odd having so much symbiote-like mass. Normally, my Other is fairly small by necessity. It needed to fit inside my body, after all. But now, we have the combined mass of our human half as well. I’d diminished quite significantly in size as my body deteriorated, but I still must have been well over two hundred pounds. 

We've never been shy about transforming my flesh alongside my Other's, but it's still more constraining than purely symbiote flesh. Now our ability to shift our shape would be nearly unrestricted.

A strange sort of discomfort reminds us that there are setbacks to our new form as well.

It's an unsettling feeling of something being out of place or missing. Like grasping for something you expect to be there, but closing your hand around only empty air, instead. 

A feeling like being exposed,naked, unprotected. Like trying to back up into a corner but your back never meets the wall and suddenly you feel even more exposed to the unknown space behind you. 

I recognize it only second hand, but my Other knows it well. Our body is pleading for it, far softer than the Other has ever known it to, but still undoubtedly there:

_ Host. _

Not unbearable. Not even truly insistent. But nevertheless incessant.

I suddenly feel somehow ashamed. It makes sense. We are, for all intents and purposes, a symbiote without a host. It makes sense that our body yearns for one. And yet…

I can't escape the knowledge that I could not provide that for my Other. And now, never can again. I wasn't enough then. I surely could not be enough now.

Our false clothes wrap more tightly around us in what I can sense is intended to be a sort of embrace.

I'm nearly overcome with a wave of love and reassurance from my Other. Its emotions are all so close and clear now. 

More than a host. Always was. This proves it. Even without a body, important to it. Perfect for it. Not because it needs my body. Wants  _ me _ . My mind, my soul. Loves  _ me _ .

And, with the combination of my dna to its, we're now far more autonomous than it had been. We both know what separation felt like. What both of us felt, and how the Other felt, specifically, without a host. Does this feel like that?

"...no." I admit, my voice still strange to my ears, though I'm beginning already to understand better how to replicate sounds like this. "Not by half."

Because I still am providing for it. Still protecting it. Protecting us. Our body still feels the echoes of need for a host, but we are not incomplete. We are not alone. Not lost without any sense of purpose, a fraction of a broken whole. 

The corner of my lip curls up in a small smile. The smile, however, quickly turns to a grimace. 

A deep, aching pain throbs through us and our whole form shudders.

“Not providing enough,” I say, through teeth gritted against the pain. “The hunger…”

While, technically, we just had the equivalent of a very large meal, the energy taken by fusing that mass together with that of the symbiote counteracted anything we could have gained from it and whatever dredges of whatever it is we crave that might of have been left in my brain were clearly not enough to keep the hunger at bay for long. 

Now it seems that we’re already to the end of whatever grace period we gained.

It feels different now. Not like a human hunger that tears at the stomach, but a craving that echoes through our whole body. Somehow the lack of the more understandable stomach pain only intensifies the feeling. Even if clutching at our stomach didn’t truly help anything before, it gave a feeling of being able to do some action in an attempt to escape from the pain. Now it just bears down on us, heavy and demanding. 

Our form shudders again, rippling violently. Our legs lose nearly all their structure for a moment and we stumble backwards off our feet. 

Instead of hitting the tower floor, however, we slam into the church bell, hard enough to set the clapper swinging and striking against the inside and the bell tolling.

An utterly inhuman screech escapes us as we fall the rest of the way to the floor.

The sound! The sound!

It’s so bad! So much worse than it had been together before. Without a host body, we have no way to hide from it. Our hands instinctively clasp over our ears, but it has no effect. We’ve no solid body to absorb and dampen the sound, shielding us from it, but also no way to jettison from one to try to escape it. 

Before we can even hope to properly react, we’re overcome with a flood of memories.

_ Didn’t mean to lie. Don’t even understand what it is to lie. Only wanted to help. Only wanted you. It hurts please it hurts so much. Why do you hate me I tried to do everything right please I loved you I only ever loved you only ever wanted to love you. _

I’m choking, drowning, in the sea of painful recollection. I know these memories, secondhand, but only so much as the Other has shown me. As much as it has ever relented to be seen. Now I’m hit with the full force of them, nearly as painful as the force of concussive sound that seems to be shaking us apart at a cellular level.

The Other always tried to hide the extent of its pain, even from me, but now it can withhold nothing, the memories laid bare like an open wound, exposed and vulnerable.

We have to get away! Escape from this awful sound, tearing us apart!

Half of us tries to release our solid form to escape, but the human in us can’t help but cling to it. Finally, it finds a strange compromise in keeping our shape, but losing all rigidity and our nearly human shape slips down through the floorboards like the wood turned liquid and swallowed us whole.

We seep down through the cracks and pores of the wood, down to the ceiling of the nave. Our Symbiote half tries to cling to the rafters, but our human half can’t understand how and is still trying to maintain our human shape, so we instead fall, limbs flailing, to the floor below, splashing against the ground and into a large splatter of black ooze, like an oil spill across the faded carpeting. 

It takes us a moment to regain any semblance of composure and, quite literally, pull ourselves back together. 

Our arms and head stretch up and out of the gooey mess that is the rest of our body and we pull ourselves up and backwards to give our legs room to reform as well. 

We lie on our back, looking upwards at the vaulted ceiling. 

“That was a...novel sensation,” I say, grimacing as another deep ache of hunger grips us.

We sit up in a flash as we hear a voice calling from the vestibule.

“Is someone there?” it calls. “I heard screaming! Is someone hurt?”

I touch a hand to my throat. My voice still sounds so strange. Making sound without the use of air as I’m used to is difficult and the result is far from natural sounding. It will reveal us in an instant.

I send a vague mental image to my Other and it helps me to guide our flesh into the proposed shape. We stretch the back of our mouth into a tube running down the inside of our neck and spreading to an open cavity in our chest. 

Expanding the crude, pseudo-lungs, I draw in a breath. It doesn’t feel like breathing, really. There is no complicated porous tissue drawing oxygen out of the air. More like a set of bellows than lungs, but it still feels somehow comforting to be able to perform the familiar physical action, even if the sensation produced is far from familiar.

Between my DNA structures that still remain in our new form and the Other’s recollection of the shape of my human body, we manage to create an approximation of my old vocal chords in our facsimile of a throat. 

I hum, feeling the vibration of the air passing through our false larynx. Still not quite as before, but the sensation is not unpleasant. 

“He-hello?” I call in return. My voice certainly sounds more human like this, though it hasn’t lost that distinctive symbiote-like rasp,and much more like my voice had sounded before. 

A figure appears in the entryway to the nave.

"Are you alright, my son?" the figure asks, stepping towards us and revealing the form of a priest, dressed in traditional garb. He has dark hair just beginning to grey, and a short, well kempt beard. "I heard screaming like someone was being tortured! The most horrible sound!"

"No, we...I…" I stammer, my normally lackluster talent for lying not at all improved by the stress and shock of the current situation. 

Before I can even try to compose a decent lie, however, another hunger pang strikes and we double over, hissing in pain. 

"Are you hurt?" The priest hurries to us and kneels beside us.

Not breathing and drawing in breath through a nose, our sense of smell had been dulled. We hadn't focused on creating scent detecting structures at all. With the man so close now, we can't help but line the surface of our skin with scent receptors.

And we're all but overwhelmed.

The smell of life, of blood, of  _ brains  _ is  _ everywhere. _

It's no longer contained to or controlled by our breath, instead just seeping into us from all sides. Holding our breath can do nothing to stop it. 

Our gasp of shock is choked off into a pained gurgle as the hunger wracks our body again. 

No, no. Not this. Not like this. Not here!

The priest says something more but we don't catch it, trying too desperately to ignore the smell and the pain and craving.

He reaches out and we try to pull backwards away from him, but he lays a hand on the false cloth of our jacket on our shoulder.

Things suddenly move so fast. 

Skin sinking into symbiote flesh. 

Tendrils of slime coating, covering, climbing up the length of the arm, yanking forward.

Jaws opening so wide.

The beginnings of a scream cut short.

Teeth crushing through bone, tearing away flesh until--

_ It's heaven! It's deliverance! It's so good it tastes like everything we need, everything we crave. It tastes so good! It's so good! _

Tongue lapping and curling against a curved hollow of an empty skull.

Flesh, mass, with nowhere to put it. No digestive system, no cells with which to absorb and store. 

Added directly to us, instead. Just increasing our own mass.

_ More, more. More flesh. More mass. More to add and shape and use to get more of that heaven. That relief.  _

The body is nearly half gone when we finally come back to ourselves.

I desperately scramble backwards. 

It can't be real! This can't be real! Dear God, please this can't be happening!

We're on our feet again without truly standing, our shape simply morphing from one position to the next, backing away from the horrific sight.

I glance down at our hands, the fingers of which end in thick claws. The blood coating them sinks into our flesh and we can taste it.

And we don't dislike it.

"Dear God. Dear God! A priest! A man of God! Christ forgive us! God have mercy on us!" I sob. "We didn't… We didn't mean to--"

We back roughly into the alter table. The crucifix atop it falls from its place and clatters to the floor beside us, breaking in two. 

"We didn't-- _ GAAAH!" _

We scream out in pain as the hunger lances through us like a red hot poker.

It hurts so much! Even worse than before! We can't--we _ have _ to--

More and more teeth crowd our mouth as the hunger crowds any thought from our mind.

We cannot wait. We need it. We can't think. Can't begin to consider innocence and guilt, deserving and undeserving. 

All we know, all we can know, is the hunger, tearing at us down to our every cell. Every fiber of our being shrieks, crying out, begging for anything to fill our need and numb our pain. Anything to sate our hunger. 

  
God help us we're  _ so hungry. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that didn't take long. 
> 
> I reread Planet of the Symbiotes and realized that the fusion scene happened in front of the alter of the church, not in the bell tower, but I'm not going to fix it in this fic. It just works better to have it in the bell tower.
> 
> Yes that priest is who you might think it is, for those who have read a certain run. Whoops. Sorry. (Yeah I know that he only goes to OLoS later but I wanted it to be him and this is an alternate universe so no one can stop me)
> 
> I had a really hard time coming up with a title for this chapter. I may end up changing it. Right now it's referencing the end of the "grace period" or reprieve from the hunger that Eddie and his Other had after consuming Eddie's human body, and the end of "grace" in a religious sense. That their connection to god and to all things holy is severed by the extent of their sin.


	8. For It Shall Be Very Grevious

We are hungry. We are always hungry.

We are hunting.

We are always hunting.

We don't sleep anymore. We don't need to. We don't remember if we ever did. We don't need to remember.

We hunt instead.

Every moment. We are searching, feeding, growing.

Every meal adds more to us. Makes us bigger and bigger.

We are very big.

Very, very big.

They think that means they can find us. They try very hard to. But we are very hard to find. 

We can be very stealthy. Silent and invisible. Colder than we were. Colder than their cameras that see warmth can find. 

They cannot find us.

But we can find them. 

And we are much bigger than them. Much, much bigger. With far more teeth. Bigger still, after we find them. 

We are big, but we are flexible. We don’t see faces anymore. We can’t remember a time when we ever did, if we ever did. We see the cold world of unliving things as shapes defined only by their relation to our own. By how we can fit through and around them. We see the world of living things as warm, life sustaining food. We see nothing else around us. We feel nothing else inside us.

The winding, twisting tunnels and pipes are our pathways. Underground, dark and wet where they know better now than to come to look for us. Where we are everywhere. Where they would come in teams with lights that would go out one by one.

Then up, up, into thin metal pipes that loop and branch and lead to warm and dry rooms where they do not expect us to be. Where they think we cannot be. 

But we are.

They do not walk over sewer grates anymore. They stay clear of manholes. They know better now. They have learned. But it does not stop us.

Because we learn,too.

We have learned the tiny metal parts that hold their doors shut. How to hold them so that they turn and yield. We have found the wires in the walls that keep their rooms bright. We can see without them.

But they cannot.

We make houses and streets go quiet. Sometimes very loud first, then very quiet. 

We feed. We are always feeding. But it does so little. We feed and feed and feed and we grow and grow, but the hunger grows, too. There is almost no relief in feeding. We continue because it’s all we know. It’s what we are compelled to do. 

We are never full. We never even feel fuller. It hurts to be empty. To be so hungry. It’s all we can feel. Each meal is a fleeting moment of relief, each time shorter and less powerful. There is a time we would have wondered what will happen when there’s no relief at all. 

But it’s not now. Now we don’t think things like that. We can’t. We barely think at all. 

We only hunt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short chapter. But it's meant to be. Just a snippet to show that time is passing and that Eddie and his Other, if this thing they've become can even still be called that, are falling deeper and deeper into an inhuman state of constant hunger and feeding, and that their actions aren't going unnoticed. That some action has been taken to try to stop them, with little success. 
> 
> Thanks to Eldritchsquared for helping me come up with the name for this chapter. It's another bible quote "Genesis 41:31 - And the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine following; for it shall be very grievous"


	9. Happier Were the Victims of the Sword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Than the victims of hunger

_ It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts _

_ We’re so hungry please it hurts it hurts so much we’re so hungry but eating hurts it hurts so much _

_ The more we eat it just hurts more. We get bigger but we don’t get fuller. The void in us just grows and grows and we eat and eat and eat but it just hurts it hurts _

_ We can’t keep to the sewers we can’t be stealthy we can’t be quiet  _

_ It’s like swallowing air worse than that, even like swallowing a hole a pit a vacuum a void _

_ We eat because we hurt and grow because we eat and hurt because we grow and eat  _

_ And we hurt and hurt and hurt and eat and eat and eat. We don’t hide anymore. We can’t think. We can’t think at all we just grab and grasp and bite and hurt and hurt it doesn’t work nothing works but there’s nothing else in us it hurts we’re starving please we’re starving! _

_ It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts I _ **_t hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger, who wasted away, pierced by lack of the fruits of the field." -- Lamentations 4:9 
> 
> Another super tiny micro-update. Eddie and his Other have reached the point where they're so big that eating and adding mass to themselves is actually costing them more PEA than they get from eating. So they're actually starving themselves more the more they eat, which only makes them try to eat more. 
> 
> This is the first time I actually feel a little bad leaving y'all with this. Since the next chapter will be longer and probably take me a while.
> 
> Since there are only 2 chapters left, I'll warn readers again of what's warned in the tags. This fic does not have a happy ending. I have one planned, but it would be in a subsequent fic. Which I may never be able to write. This one will end poorly and fairly open ended, so be prepared for that.


	10. For These Things I Weep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spider-Man finally gets the lead he needs to solve the mystery of the creature terrorizing New York  
> (Tw for brief animal death (pigeons))

"Someone got a picture of it? How? It's invisible, isn't it?"

The detective shrugs. He'd flagged me down during my daily web-swinging patrols of the city, trying to find a trace of what people had been calling 'The Sewer Beast'. Not the most creative name, to be honest.

But I guess I can't really judge. 'Spider-Man' isn't exactly breaking new ground in terms of creativity, either. 

"Visible enough to snap a photo of," the detective says, handing me a small Polaroid photo.

"The quality leaves something to be desired," I say with a grimace, hidden by my mask. "Who took this?" 

"Amateur photographer," the detective replies. "Thought he'd try to get a picture of the thing, make a fortune selling it, or at least get his fifteen minutes of fame. Maybe he would have, if he hadn't died taking it." 

I shudder. The hundreds of gleaming, drool covered fangs in the photo seem like an awful way to go. 

"Someone saw nearly the whole thing from their window," the detective continues. "Heard a car alarm going off and looked outside. All the sudden this sonnuva gun just appears out of thin air, big as a school bus with enough legs to make a centipede jealous, apparently,and teeth to put any great white shark to shame, screeching something awful."

"A _ school bus?"  _ I exclaim, under my breath. It's hard to believe something so big could be so stealthy as to not be caught for so long.

"Apparently, our would-be Pulitzer prize winner decided to take a snapshot instead of making a break for it. Last mistake he ever made. But seems like it may be the break we've been looking for," the detective explains. "We've been looking for this thing for months, with no reliable info, ever since we got a report from two men involved in some kinda traffic incident claiming they saw a monster that tried to eat them. But they both gave wildly different interpretations and one tested positive for crack cocaine, so we couldn't get any useful information. If we hadn't found a body at the scene, all torn up and half eaten like that, same way we’d been finding bodies the last month or so, we would have just chalked the whole thing up to a bad trip."

I look over the picture. It’s pretty obvious why the detective flagged me down specifically. 

I admit I'd been trying to deny the possibility of who or what this weird creature terrorizing the Big Apple could be and the growing list of similarities between it and a certain alien/human duo I know.

Not because I like Venom. Of course not. He’s tried to kill me more times than I can count. 

But this isn’t their M.O. This thing is killing indiscriminately. A lot of people who Eddie definitely would have considered innocent included. Eddie may be “unpredictable” at best, “homicidally insane” at worst, but, as bizarre and incomprehensible his moral code is, he sticks to it fiercely. 

Venom has shown time and time again he’d put protecting innocents above nearly everything else, including trying to kill his worst enemies, like Cletus Kasady and even me. He loves posturing and yelling about how he was ‘innocent once’, usually while shaking his fist and throwing something very large and heavy at me. Despite being able to turn invisible, he’s never relied on stealth. I’m not sure he really knows how to. This is totally out of character for him. 

Of course the thought had occurred to me more than once, and the evidence seemed to be piling up. An invisible monster who was in the sewers who also seemed to be able to fit into impossibly small spaces like a liquid? One that, no matter where I looked, how hard I searched, never so much as prickled at my spidey sense? Of course I thought about it. Just the fact that Venom himself hadn't made any appearance was enough to suspect. It seemed it was impossible to have any weird, brain-eating monster situation without them somehow ending up being in the middle of it. 

I suppose that's still the case now.

It's just...despite everything, I guess I just didn’t want to believe that he was capable of... _ this.  _

Sure, Eddie made nearly constant threats about eating my brain, lungs, face, etc., but I guess I never wanted to believe that those threats could be genuine. 

I’d even heard from another detective that,less than a year ago, Eddie’d been the main suspect when another brain-eating alien started munching on the heads of the denizens of New York and that he’d been appalled at the accusation, personally tracking down and killing the creature himself. 

But,looking at the jet black, viscous shape of the creature,its jagged, crescent shaped eyes, and its long, drooling tongue, it’s hard to deny. 

And, though it’s stretched and distorted nearly beyond recognition, the white spider symbol across what might have served as the creature’s chest is pretty damning. 

That means it isn't just a leftover from the Symbiote invasion. This is Venom.

The thought is chilling, moreso than I'd expect it to be. It's just that, Eddie was depraved, sure, but not  _ this _ depraved. Not "giving Carnage a run for his money" depraved.

Which either means that the suit finally managed to corrupt him entirely, convincing him to finally abandon the few morals he'd been able to hold on to with that thing poisoning his mind…

Or...

I look up from the photo and the detective gives me an expectant look.

"If you're looking for my confirmation, you've got it," I say, handing him back the photo. "It's Venom. No doubt in my mind."

The detective sighs. 

"Guess you can't run around wrapped up in an evil alien and expect not to wind up facing some consequences worse than a stay at Rikers or The Raft," he says. "Still, seems a shame, thinking that thing used to be human." 

He slips the photo back into his jacket pocket.

"Most of the boys on the force don't trust you to help with something like this, but far as I figure, you know more about this thing than anyone," he says. "Be silly not asking for your advice."

"Well, I know Venom's two main weaknesses are sound and fire. I don't know how this thing is different from Venom beyond looks, but I'd wager to say those are still our best bet," I say, then pause as a detail of his story stands out in my mind. 

"You said the eyewitness came outside because they heard an alarm?" I ask.

The detective nods. 

"A car alarm, yes."

"And it became visible?"

He nods again.

"It must have been the sound from the alarm!" I exclaim. "Contact every radio station in New York City, tell them to start playing loud, high pitched noise. Microphone feedback, sirens, whatever they can. Have the tv stations tell people to keep their radios on hand and blast the volume at the first sign of trouble. Use airhorns, car alarms, whatever they have. If we flood the city with sound, we'll force this thing out of hiding where we can fight it!"

I shoot a line of webbing onto a nearby building. 

"I'll start getting the word out," I say, jumping up and starting to swing away. "Better get a good set of earplugs detective! Things are about to get loud!"

\---

I'd like to think it was my brilliant strategy and expert insight that made “Venom” so easy to find, but I have to admit it's not nearly as stealthy as it had been these past few months. The radio stations had only been pumping out high pitched noise for less than an hour before reports were pouring in about an invisible monster tearing up downtown. 

Normally, when people got attacked, it was when they wandered too close to a dark alleyway or a sewer grate. And they just sort of...vanished. one second they'd be there, the next, they'd just be gone, with a little puddle of blood and drool the most ever left behind as evidence they'd even existed. Or they'd just disappear during the night, without any of their neighbors even realizing until the next day. 

Now it seems this thing is on a full on rampage, not even trying for stealth beyond its basic state of invisibility. Even that, though, seems imperfect. Swinging from building to building, trying to keep pace with the locomotive of alien goo without getting in range, I can still make out a sort of blurry outline. 

Not that I really need to, since it's trashing every car, stoplight, and street sign in its path.

Unless it's some other giant, mostly invisible monster terrorizing New York. Which, let's be honest, I've lived here long enough that I'd never rule anything out completely.

I can't say I'm thrilled at the idea of getting any closer to that thing, but I've got to get its attention if the plan is going to work. 

Putting on a burst of speed, I get out ahead of it.

"Hey, Houdini!" I shout, swinging just low enough that I'm confident it can see me, without risking getting any closer than I need to to its thrashing, grasping tentacles I can only just make out as blurry shapes, like smudged glass.

"I'll admit your disappearing act was getting pretty stale, but I can't really say I'm much of a fan of your new material, either!" 

I shoot a layer of webbing at my best estimate of where its face is. It briefly coats it, seeming to float in the air, but then disappears as it's absorbed by the alien mass. 

"Too much to hope that would work, huh?" I quip. "Least it looks like I've got your attention!"

No doubt of that! The thing charges at me, veering sharply in is its charge, knocking over a light post as it does so. 

It shoots a blurry, semi-transparent tentacle at me and I barely dodge out of the way in time. 

Yup. Definitely no spidey sense for this thing. It’s been a while since I fought Venom or any of his weird symbiote spawn, I’d nearly forgotten what a disadvantage not having my spider senses to warn me of incoming attacks puts me at. I tend to think of it as a way of detecting surprise attacks, but being without it always reminds me of just how much I rely on it for instant, reflexive, dodges. 

Another barely misses me, slashing through the air just inches from my head. 

Trying to dodge while swinging along at full speed is tricky but, luckily, it seems as though the creature is even less able to split its focus than I am.

Apparently focusing too much on me, it takes a corner too hard and slams nearly headlong into the side of a building, sending shards of glass and chunks of rubble flying in all directions. 

The air seems to shudder violently before--

“ _ Oh my God!”  _ I gasp, nearly losing my grip on my webline, as the creature’s tenuous invisibility finally gives out and its form is finally fully visible. 

The blurred, tiny Polaroid did this thing no justice. 

Squirming and shaking off bits of rubble is something straight out of a horror movie. Like H.R. Gieger and H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares had a baby with John Carpenter’s special effect department; With all the slime, tentacles, and mismatched appendages as you expect out of that kind of union. 

It must be at least 30 feet long, and as wide as a sedan. Its overall shape is worm or serpent-like, but with many sharp, spindly legs jutting out of its sides. I’m not about to try to count them, but they don’t look like they’re arranged in any kind of equal pairs on each side. 

The thing screeches and I have to stop myself from letting go of my webline to cover my ears. The sound is like nails on a chalkboard! 

Goo flies around it in all directions as it screams, like some kind of demonic lava lamp, shooting out from the main body then being pulled back in. Despite its gooey consistency, it seems as though it’s lined in segments like an earthworm or a millipede and its back is lined with haphazardly arranged spines and ridges. 

Its body doesn’t seem to be one singular mass, either, but rather made up of bits and pieces of different body and limb shapes all struggling and failing to form a cohesive, uniform shape, some parts looking like rows of bones like rib cages or spines, others looking like insectoid plates, others still looking almost like mechanical parts, all of which only distinct enough to be distinguishable for a moment, before shifting into some new nightmarish configuration. 

Though, as is usually the case with Venom, the face is the real star of the freak show. 

Venom always liked to go all-out with creating the most monstrous jaws and fangs, but this is on an entirely different level. What could be called the creature’s upper jaw is more of a semicircle lined with huge, dagger-like teeth jutting out from it in random directions while what might have served as a lower jaw is split down the middle, branching out into two pincer-like protrusions. Around the freakish excuse for a mouth are sharp mandibles, some curved inwards around the gaping maw and others outward like horns. Each is lined with spikes and barbs and the entirety of the mouth region is coated and dripping with green saliva. 

Set above the nightmare that is this thing’s mouth are two, blotchy eye spots; More jagged and indistinct than normal, but still immediately recognizable as Venom’s. 

I notice something strange about them, though. At first I thought it was just some wayward drool that found its way above the mouth region, but now I can see that the eye spots themselves seem to be oozing some kind of clearish liquid that’s running down it’s face almost like…

Tears?

Is it...crying? 

It screeches again and suddenly the noise does sound distinctly distraught. 

I land against the side of another building, sticking to the glass, still far enough away to be confident in not in the creature's range but close enough to see, trying to get a better look.

Is it in pain? It doesn’t look hurt, though it’s hard to tell with how completely crazy its body looks, but it’s clearly not on fire and there’s not enough noise right now for it to be hurt from that. What else can even hurt a symbiote?

I shake my head. Symbiotes don’t cry. They’re aliens for goodness’ sake. They don’t even have tear ducts! And it wouldn’t matter anyway. If that thing hit its head, it's its own fault.

A piece of the the building that had been valiantly holding on finally gives out, dropping a chunk of mortar and brick onto a nearby tree, starling a small flock of pigeons, who had apparently been hiding among the leaves, into flight.

The Venom creature's head jerks upwards, honing in on the birds and, before they'd even barely made it into the sky, several tentacles shoot out from its gooey body and snatching them out of the air nearly faster than my eyes can keep up with. 

Before I can even fully process what I'm seeing, the thing's huge maw opens impossibly wider and it tosses a still struggling pigeon inside before ending the bird's life with a swift, sickening 'crunch'. The rest of the pigeons swiftly follow suit.

I feel sick to my stomach. The ruthless but also emotionless violence sends a shiver down my spine. 

The thing screeches a third time, even louder than the last two times, limbs and tentacles flailing,liquid (I won’t say tears) running down what could, with some imagination, possibly be considered its face. It really does sound like a scream of agony. 

But maybe that’s just me projecting the agony that sound is causing my poor ear drums.

The glass of the building I’m on suddenly begins to splinter from the noise and I leap off just before it shatters into a million razor sharp shards. My spider sense might not work on Venom, but, luckily for me, it still works on cracking glass. 

I shoot out a webline and swing a bit closer to the creature that was once Venom. I’m thankful for the chance to catch my breath, but this thing’s still got to follow me if I’m going to be able to pull off the full plan. 

I shoot a glob of web over its face again, which is quickly absorbed, but at least gets the creature to look up at me.

“Has anyone ever told you you have a lovely singing voice?” I quip. “Well, I think they lied!”

The creature hisses loudly and I don’t stick around for it to try to grab me, shooting another webline behind me and swinging at full speed. 

Shaking the rubble off of itself, the creature starts after me and the chase is back on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is another Bible quote. "For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears." from Lamentations 1
> 
> I meant for this to be one chapter, the final one aside from the epilogue, but it was getting big and it had already taken so long. So I stopped it here. 
> 
> It was interesting to switch to Spider-Man's POV, since his style of speech and therefore writing is very different than Eddie's. I considered doing this from Venom's POV, but decided it would be too confusing in that very limited style that Venom is working with right now.
> 
> Venom's look right now is basically how the Symbiote looked in the scene in The Hunger where it eats the cab driver, biker, and cab passenger, but bigger and wider.


End file.
